Rainy spring, crazy results
Helen Chesnut
QSome of my plants grew in a peculiar fashion this year. Beans that I seeded in the spring grew extra-large but healthy looking leaves. Flowers developed, but they almost all fell off. The same thing happened to the strawberries, which also grew huge leaves, but developed few flowers and berries.
A: This happened in many gardens this past spring, because of the extended period of cool, rainy weather. Copious rainfall (and over watering) leads to over-lush foliage at the expense of flowering and fruiting.
Another common cause of an excess of greenery is an overabundance of nitrogen in the soil. Nitrogen fosters green leafy growth. The nitrogen (N) content of garden soils needs to be balanced by phosphorus (P), which aids root development and the formation of flowers, fruit, pods and seeds, and potassium (K), which also promotes good root growth, as well as fruit quality and disease resistance in plants. Potassium hardens plant cells and is a counterbalance to nitrogen.
Fertilizer labels list the values of these three major nutrients as three numbers, in the N-P-K order.
An over-generous supply of nitrogen-rich compost or/and manures in the soil is a common cause of too much nitrogen. I once planted strawberries on the site of a previous compost heap. That planting produced the strangest strawberry bed. It looked like a mini-forest of lush, deep green leaves. It was lovely, though bereft of berries.
An immediate remedy, when a planting begins showing signs of too much nitrogen, is to water with a no-nitrogen product such as MorBloom (0-10-10). Over the longer term, bone meal and rock phosphate are sources of phosphorus. Kelp meal and greensand supply potassium, as do wood ashes, but the ashes are highly alkaline and need to be used sparingly and not at all around acid-loving plants and blue hydrangeas.